Allow Chrome's Live Caption

[ChimeraLove]

Hi,
Chrome have an option to add subtitles for videos that don't have them.
Please allow this feature:
chrome://settings > Accessibility > Live Caption

Thank you

[Hadden89]

@ChimeraLove Just a question. They works for any video or for PIP videos?
But I suspect they might not work, if they are bound to google speech APIs, as I fear.
Have you tested with other chromiums, like edge?

[yngve]

The Live Caption system requires support for Speech Recognition, which probably (I haven't investigated) requires subscribing to a Google Cloud API which very likely requires payment per second of use.

[Catweazle]

@yngve, maybe this can help (without Google)

https://github.com/alphacep/vosk-api

[yngve]

@Catweazle It is not my area, but unless that system is bit-by-bit compatible with what Google is using, that would require quite a lot of work to integrate (and probably also to provide expensive infrastructure).

Personally, I have doubts about how accurate such systems are. The technology may have advanced in the 5 years since I was in the audience of the World Science Fiction Convention Hugo Award ceremony in Dublin in 2019, where the convention was deploying an automatic live caption system for the presenters. The result was hilarious, and I am pretty sure Ada Palmer wondered what everybody thought was so funny about her speech, until she turned around and saw what the system had printed. The system was eventually disabled.

Additionally, I watch a "few" science shows on TV that are sub-texted in Norwegian. There are numerous instances of the professional translators (who are not doing this live) not getting numbers, temperatures, and distances correct. I somehow doubt that automatic systems will be better.

[Catweazle]

@yngve, I know that stt apps are not very exact, not even from Google. You can see it the best in YT, activating subtitles, certainly provided by Google. The results are very often hilarious. And this with a tecnology which already has a lot of years, even Windows include an speech to text app by default since Vista.

The difficulty is that the app must recognize very different voices, that is, it works quite well by training it with a certain voice, even Windows voice recognition, after calibrating it with your own voice, works quite well, but if another person wants to use it, fails.

Until now it may serve for short commands, but not so for writing a long text.

[7twenty]

Windows 11 has had a live caption option since the last major update (i think). Works quite well, and doesn't need any updates/changes to vivaldi. I've watched youtube videos at 1.75x speed and they seem to be 99% correct.

Search for "live captions" and it should show up.

Also probably better than using the Chrome option seeing as the captions will be restricted to display the video player only, as opposed to the windows option you can move the caption window where ever you want. Probably not a huge issue for most, but handy if using PIP.

[ChimeraLove]

@7twenty Thanks!
Probably it's part of Microsoft's plan to see everything we do but I'll try it anyway!

Thanks everybody else for considering my request even if it's not possible.

[7twenty]

@ChimeraLove said in Allow Chrome's Live Caption:

Probably it's part of Microsoft's plan to see everything we do

Well it's no worse than google tracking you all over the place online & offline + knowing your emails.

[Figaro_FV]

I just took a look at this Chrome setting and it has a dropdown option for which language you prefer. The options are English and... English.

How disappointing and extremely non-inclusive. Speech recognition has existed for dozens of languages for many years now...

Edit: it is the same mediocre experience as the default Youtube subtitling: words running over your screen one at a time.
Professional translators work with complete (and condensed) sentences. How long before AI reaches that level?

[DoctorG]

@Figaro_FV said in Allow Chrome's Live Caption:

How disappointing and extremely non-inclusive.

YES!